Entries in election 2016
(1)

According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton is almost certain to win New York's electoral votes.

Thank God. That means I can vote for neither one. If it were close, I would feel obliged to vote for her, to keep him out. Hillary: the champion of unrestricted access to abortion at any stage of development. Not for her "safe, legal and rare," the catchphrase of her canny husband, who paid lip service to the pain and loss attendant upon killing the unborn. No, Hillary is the heroine of the #shoutyour abortion crowd, the patron saint of the corrupt butchers of Planned Parenthood. That's who I would have voted for, if the election in my state were close. That's how appallingly dangerous and vile Trump is.

And here's how that would make me feel: Do you remember the last episode of M*A*S*H*?

It was called "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen." In it, Hawkeye (Alan Alda) had a nervous breakdown and recounted to a psychotherapist the story of being on a bus with Vietnamese refugees, hiding from an enemy patrol. Their silence is imperative–but one poor terrified woman holds a chicken that won't stop squawking. Hawkeye furiously tells her to silence the chicken, or they will all be killed. To his horror, she does the only thing she can do–she strangles it.

Only it wasn't a chicken. The ghastly truth emerges from memory: The woman had been holding her baby. She smothered it, in desperation and fear for all their lives.

We cannot hand the nuclear codes to a madman, and our country to a loathsome demagogue–even one who claims a laughably implausible "conversion" to pro-life. But the cause of protecting the unborn has been strangled, the crying baby silenced, as the even greater and more immediate threat prowls outside the bus, locked and loaded.

And thus the odds seem good that the first woman president of the United States–a mother and a grandmother–will, in a repellent irony, enshrine as never before the "right" to silence the heartbeats of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters in the womb. Without remorse, without restriction, and–if she gets her dream–with our tax dollars to subsidize the heartbreak for the neediest women, who need real alternatives, not death for their children.

Ultra-blue-state New York, you will have done my dirty work for me. But if I lived in North Carolina or Florida, I'd do it. I'd vote for the "lesser of two evils"; I could even parlay it into a cheering welcome to the cool kids' table among my liberal friends. And I'd try to remember casting a ballot for the candidate who was just okay with killing chickens.